“I rejoice to hear that you are prospering and enjoying Chamounix. I cannot doubt that you have a most pleasant, happy, and loving party, and I shall heartily enjoy a few bright days with you and another look at those lovely mountains. There they stand unchanged, while all their admirers pass by and are gone. What a picture of what is going on in life! There is only One who is not a mere passer-by; but, thanks to God, He is unchangeable, and we need never pass away from Him. “We had a very comfortable Sunday. I preached in the morning about Jehoshaphat, to my own great interest. But in the afternoon I had a very poor attendance of men, and preached the feeblest of sermons. I hope it may have confounded the mighty, for it certainly was one of the weak things of the world, and contributed nothing to the self-elevation of the preacher. “I am now off to church to preach on holiness. May God make us partakers of His holiness!” In the autumn of 1888 his blindness began. The doctors stated that it was due to no illness, but just a sudden failure of power. He could at first see figures and large objects more or less, and detect a placard on a wall, but faces were indiscernible and reading and writing an impossibility. Yet it made no difference in his manner or character, and his life was immediately adjusted to the new state of things. The writer well remembers coming into the Vicarage study one morning, and finding the vigorous old man of seventy-six commencing the task of _learning the Bible by heart_! “It was so important to have all quotations exact.” This work was continued for some months, but when it was suggested that there would be less labour and more profit in learning the raised type for the blind, the former plan was discontinued, volumes of the latter sort were procured, the characters mastered, and for the seven years remaining the beloved study was resumed under circumstances that would have discouraged most men of his age. Blindness did not stop his work—nothing of the kind; the regular Bible and annual Confirmation classes were continued as before, the weekday and Sunday sermons as regularly prepared and preached. His daughters read to him passages from books bearing upon the subject that he had in hand, and he arranged and classified it in his own mind. Gentlemen and ladies in his congregation gladly undertook to come at stated hours and read to him books of various sorts, and so he kept abreast with all that was going on in the world of literature, and, as was his wont, met it for praise or censure in his sermons.